Mary Wroth

Mary B. Moore analyzes and provides context for love sonnet sequences by Italian, French, English, and American women poets in the light of current knowledge concerning attitudes women at the time they wrote. Through close readings of the poems combined with theory and criticism about constructs of women, historical events, and biographical contexts, Moore reveals patterns of revision among women poets that shed further light on the poets themselves, on Petrarchism as a convention, and on ideas about women. She focuses on Petrarchan sonnet sequences by women because the poems serve both as works of art and as documents that illuminate the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects (agents of speech, action, knowledge, and desire) as well as their more usual roles as erotic objects.

Combining theory with close reading, Moore enhances the value of many generally neglected poems by women. After a thorough discussion of the Petrachan sonnet tradition, she analyzes the work of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Recognizing that ideas about emotions vary historically as well as culturally, Kennedy draws from recent critical work on emotions by historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists, as well as comparative studies of the emotions by cultural anthropologists. She contends that ideas about women's anger in early modern England are both like and unlike those in twentieth-century America. Although women's anger is often dismissed as irrational in both eras, for instance, in the early modern era women were thought to become angry more often and more easily than men due to their inherent physiological, intellectual, and moral inferiority.

To establish early modern attitudes toward women's anger, Kennedy also examines a number of male-authored works, including sermons, conduct literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. The focus of her work, however, is on representations of women's anger in printed works signed with women's names in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England. She addresses the ways these writings conform to, conflict with, or appear to reconfigure prevailing beliefs about women's anger.

In exploring her subject, Kennedy deals with many popular genres of the period. She looks at such literary texts as Mary Wroth's romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, the first fiction by an English woman; Elizabeth Cary's play, The Tragedy of Mariam, the earliest extant play in English by awoman; and Aemilia Lanyer's verse collection, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. She also discusses religious writings by Protestant martyr Anne Askew and Elizabeth Cary's history of Edward II. Kennedy considers as well defenses of w